AS THE WORLD TURNS

The hordes of pathetic, dead-eyed pagans pustulating through our cities with Occupy Wall Street are the crowning achievement of America’s academy.

Thousands of vampires with PhDs laboured for decades to perfect the art of sucking the souls from America’s trusting young, and then hustling them into the slavery of terminal stupidity.

How obedient these foul-smelling young wretches are! How touchingly eager they are to please! They sit on the ground in kindergarten formation, obligingly parroting whatever hellish nihilism oozes from the “microphone leader’s” lips: “Everything is possible! You can have sex with animals.” Up go the “happy hands” in dutiful response. They so want to be good!

A British paper informs us that Bard College students are gracing the Occupy Wall Street throngs in New York, playing hookey on their US$57,000 a year classes….

Last year, that towering intellectual, Bard’s Leon Botstein became the first college president to welcome the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) as an official campus organisation.

Attention Bard parents, who thought you were shelling out a fortune to put a little artsy sheen on your precious darlings! Actually, you were thrusting them into the hands of the ISM, a terrorist-enabling group awarded a gold medal by Hamas for all their lovely help.…

The challenges ahead for France and the French people starting in 2012 are huge: a public debt equal to the GDP; 4 million unemployed people; €70 billion (AUD$95 billion) in external deficit, a vertiginous loss of competitiveness; an extraordinarily rapid deindustrialisation; uncertain energy and environmental choices; widening poverty; precariousness spreading to the middle class; not to mention other signs of decline: insecurity, obesity, addictions, corruption; and, in addition, immense European and global problems.

The presidential elections debate will have to address seriously all of these issues, valorise the assets of France and choose the best ways to implement them.

As women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up — and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the United States was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier.

We’re also marrying less — with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 per cent of my Gen X cohort was married; among today’s Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 per cent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.) These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 per cent of Millennials and 43 per cent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.

American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity.

At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Sign of the times: on September 27 Turkey took delivery of a spanking new warship, the TCG Heybeliada. The 300-foot corvette is the first in modern times built in Turkey’s own shipyards. A sister ship is reportedly undergoing sea trials.

In an unusual move, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan attended the ceremony and delivered the principal address. Even more unusual was what the newly re-elected PM said.

Erdogan began by pointing out that the ceremony was taking place on the 473rd anniversary of the Battle of Preveza in northwestern Greece. There, in 1538, an Ottoman naval fleet defeated a Christian alliance put together by Pope Paul III. After routing the Holy League, the Turkish admiral, the fabulous Hayreddin Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) went on to besiege the Venetian stronghold of Corfu and to raid the Spanish-held Calabrian coast of Italy.

Hayreddin was the Sultan’s greatest admiral. His tomb, a public park, a statue (complete with a fine patriotic poem), and a major boulevard are all major destinations in modern Istanbul. The mausoleum stands next to the Turkish Naval Museum. Traditionally, Turkish warships salute Hayreddin’s tomb with a cannon shot when embarking from the former Sublime Porte.

Said the Turkish Prime Minister: “I recommend the international community take the necessary lessons from the Preveza victory. Turkey’s national interests in the seas reach from its surrounding waters to the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.”